American History: lainnya

Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip Between 1945 and 1955, more than 1,600 German and Austrian technicians and scientists were brought to the United St...

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="serving" as="" border="0" charlestown="" church="" congregational="" first="" jedidiah="" morse="" of="" pastor="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLgP66ixZyQb4RaLRopCbtanaoh6_GpTtEYvghK4Roa77kO_ObFi3tRezVQAC_zaUnVKLbjtLNVJFr2blRpzQ29f2ESJK9qfmnsbV2eCCZfZvKn8JXcNdJp95Li6KAs-RsV5WZewAWqNDX/s1600/Jedidiah-Morse.jpg" the="" title="Jedidiah" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jedidiah Morse</td></tr> </tbody></table> Rev. Jedidiah Morse (1761–1826) was one of the early American Republic’s best-known authors and clergymen, serving as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Massachusetts</a> (now part of Boston) for thirty years. Perhaps counterbalancing his other accomplishments, Morse was also one of the forerunners in the field of U.S. conspiracy theory. Besides his pastoral duties and frequent service as an orator on civic and political occasions, Morse was a pioneer in American geography, producing one of the first popular books on the subject, Geography Made Easy (1784), just a year after his graduation from Yale College. This was followed by a series of other works, most notably the two-volume American Universal Geography (1793), which altogether went through hundreds of editions. In an age when travel was still difficult, expensive, and infrequent, it is not too much to say that Jedidiah Morse taught most Americans of his day most of what they knew of the country beyond their own immediate horizons. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870498681/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=4d67b1263c660b7b4d3adfee14f0e4fb" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0870498681&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="serving" as="" border="0" charlestown="" church="" congregational="" first="" height="1" jedidiah="" morse="" of="" pastor="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0870498681" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813509823/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=dde747bd3530591aaba9fa40eec6e471" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0813509823&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="serving" as="" border="0" charlestown="" church="" congregational="" first="" height="1" jedidiah="" morse="" of="" pastor="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0813509823" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Morse also made a name for himself as a prominent purveyor of anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories. In the hysterical kala of the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>XYZ Affair</a> and the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s, Morse lent his considerable energy and prestige to the project of turning the Bavarian Illuminati into a mainstream political issue. Joined by many other prominent New England divines, including Yale College president Timothy Dwight, Morse almost succeeded. Like many other old-fashioned New England Calvinists, Morse was deeply alarmed at the seeming rise of “infidelity” in the 1790s, a category into which he put not just the outright rejection of Christian belief, but also its liberalization into less supernatural, more rational forms such as Unitarianism and deism. Besides mankind’s innate wickedness, Morse and his colleagues blamed radical politics, especially the French Revolution and its American sympathizers, for the decline of faith, and vice versa. The year 1794 was a turning point. Robespierre’s reign of terror raged in France, while the Democratic Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion disturbed the political peace at home. That same year, deist speaker and organizer Elihu Palmer toured the United States, and Thomas Paine’s attack on revealed religion, The Age of Reason, first arrived on U.S. shores. Under the infidels’ influence, Morse believed, “uncleanness, Sabbath breaking & all the flood of iniquity which springs from these” ran riot among the people. To pillars of New England’s Federalist/Congregationalist “Standing Order,” under which the churches were supported by taxes and ministers used their pulpits to support the ruling political elite, it seemed that a “mental epidemic” was sweeping the country. It only got worse as the 1790s wore on. <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Criticism</a> of the government, and political activism against it, grew more intense during the battles over the Jay Treaty with England in 1796 and the presidency in the 1796 election. The pious Federalist John Adams beat the free-thinking Jefferson in that election, but with war against the French looming, Federalist hysteria came to a fever pitch. It was in this atmosphere, in 1797, that Jedidiah Morse, Timothy Dwight, and their colleagues discovered John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, finding in its account of the Illuminati campaign to destroy all religions and governments a ready explanation for many political and cultural trends that disturbed them. Morse launched his personal campaign against the Illuminati by giving two sermons on the national fast day proclaimed by President Adams for 9 May 1798, one at his own church and one at North Church, Boston. Following New England tradition, where sermons were popular reading matter and often served as political tracts, Morse’s effort was published soon afterwards. In his Sermon on the National Fast Day, Morse attacked the “deep-laid plan” of the French Republic “to destroy the confidence of the [American] people” in the men and institutions that governed them, a plan being implemented not just by the French themselves, but also by their local minions, the Democratic Republicans. What was worse, they had criticized the clergy, too, suggesting that some secret, even deeper design was “in operation, hostile to true liberty and religion,” preparing the way “for the spread” here of “that atheistical philosophy” that was “deluging the Old World in misery and blood.” Morse recommended Robison’s book as a judicious explanation of everything that was happening, attributing it all to “the dark conspiracies of the Illuminati”. Initially the response was less sensational than Morse must have hoped, but the controversy kept him and the Illuminati in the public eye for most of the next two years. Democratic Republican newspapers questioned Robison’s veracity, printing negative reviews of the book from the British press, and demanded proof of the charges. Not much proof was to be had, but Morse gamely struck back with newspaper articles and clippings defending Robison and attacking their critics. At the same, <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Salem</a> minister William Bentley, a rare Jeffersonian among the Massachusetts clergy, supplied equal amounts of material damning Morse’s position and his sources. The controversy was renewed and expanded with a round of published Thanksgiving sermons from Morse and many other New England ministers over the winter of 1798–1799. Morse’s included an appendix that tried to document a view of American events closely following the pattern of Robison’s and the Abbé Barruel’s accounts of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">French Revolution</a>. The Democratic Republican Societies of 1793–1794 were not mere debating clubs, he tried to show, but extensions of the Illuminati. They had been founded by a French agent, “Citizen” Edmond Genet, and merely went underground and reappeared under other names after President Washington had publicly blamed them for the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>Whiskey Rebellion</a>. Morse finally seemed to get his Illuminati witch-hunt on firm ground with a third published sermon, originally given on another national fast day, 25 April 1799. This time a triumphant Morse claimed finally to have “complete and indubitable proof that such societies do exist, and have for many years existed, in the United States”. The smoking gun was a letter detailing the membership and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>organization</a> (all the way back in 1786) of a somewhat irregular Masonic organization called Wisdom Lodge in Portsmouth, Virginia, made up chiefly of immigrants from St. Domingue and France. There were suggestions of other U.S. lodges being in contact with Wisdom Lodge, and a mother club in France, but the connection to the Bavarian Illuminati was tenuous at best and the evidence of any real influence nonexistent. Nevertheless, Morse felt the case was sealed, and the Illuminati theory gained some ground, until it was derailed by a new controversy over Morse’s own integrity. It happened that both Morse and his antagonist William Bentley were in correspondence with the German geographer Christoph Ebeling. To both men, Ebeling had written letters castigating Robison’s book, contradicting many of the alleged facts it cited, and dismissing the idea that the Bavarian Illuminati still existed in any form. Rumors of the letters began to circulate in the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>summer</a> of 1799. The following autumn, Bentley saw to it that the text of his Ebeling letter appeared in several newspapers, anonymously but describing the writer and recipient in such a way that readers might assume the Massachusetts man who received the letter was Morse himself. The Illuminati theory’s chief U.S. backer was forced on the defensive, unable to come clean without admitting that he had covered up incriminating <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jedidiah Morse>information</a> even though it was provided by a respected colleague. By the end of 1799, Republican newspapers were openly ridiculing Morse and his ideas, and building a sort of satirical conspiracy theory about the “New England Illuminati,” an oligarchy of “political priests” of which Morse was said to be a ringleader. Morse soon had to drop the Illuminati theory from his repertoire, although he continued to fight for the old-time Puritan religion in other ways over the rest of his life. His skills as a controversialist and publishing entrepreneur were put to good use resisting the teaching of liberal theology at Harvard, promoting missions to the Indians and western migrants, and helping establish Andover Theological Seminary, the New England Tract Society, the American Bible Society, and the American Tract Society. The family tradition of scientific and artistic achievement mixed with conspiracy was carried on by Jedidiah’s son, Samuel F. B. Morse.

Jedidiah Morse

Jedidiah Morse Rev. Jedidiah Morse (1761–1826) was one of the early American Republic’s best-known authors and clergymen, serving as pa...

MOVE

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXixprt-AfB7XrozJtyx177D_PhzveNOk5qG21kiBjlhiOkKiQHAXabhtd6EhP9HW6Fb80pIaWeVVq50DXaQRuMI0ZhO1XYlIG1eIsjlmAPoq1id15TsmyezrypA2VhP-dMNiYZcZ_goB/s1600/move.jpg" width="470" /></a></div> A radical African American activist organization, MOVE was influenced by many of the Left’s turn to paranoia and conspiratorial thinking in the counter-cultural years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like those that made up the Weathermen and the Black Panther Party, MOVE members saw mainstream U.S. culture as beyond repair, and sought to form a counterconspiracy to create an alternative society in which its members could live. MOVE—it is unclear if the name of the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>organization</a> has ever acted as a specific acronym—was founded in 1972 in the Powelton Village neighborhood of Philadelphia by African American handyman Vincent Leaphart. With the assistance of white graduate-student activist Donald Glassey, Leaphart (now calling himself John Africa; all MOVE members took the last name of Africa) wrote the Guidelines, a manifesto detailing the beliefs of MOVE. This document, clearly influenced by the counter-cultural New Left, Black Power, and environmental movements of the late 1960s/early 1970s, attempted to establish MOVE as a viable political organization, touching upon such themes as racism, police brutality, vegetarianism, <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>technology</a>, and political representation. In fact, much of MOVE’s early writings and rhetoric attempted to revive and build upon these earlier movements and, in the process, cure them of their excesses. Africa stressed the importance of cleansing one’s body, insisting that his followers abstain from all drugs and medicines, alcohol, meat, and ostentatious clothing. Science was “a trick” that only served to inculcate people into the “addictions” of the “System lifestyle” (Anderson and Hevenor, 9). What was needed, Africa stressed, was a back-to-nature manner of living. There would therefore be no birth control practiced within the MOVE organization, and members’ diets would consist almost exclusively of raw fruits and vegetables. Trash, human <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>waste</a>, and even dead animals were left to “cycle” back to the earth on MOVE property, leading to run-ins with both neighbors and the Philadelphia police. At the same time, MOVE children were to be naked in the summer and only lightly clothed in the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=MOVE>winter</a>, while adult males and females were commanded to grow their hair into unwashed dreadlocks and dress alike in blue jeans, blue denim jackets, and heavy-soled men’s boots. MOVE saw schools, political parties and leaders, and all branches of the law as corrupt and enslaving. Moreover, the forces that controlled such institutions were viewed as actively conspiring against MOVE members and their allies. For example, as MOVE member Jeanne Africa explained, “drugs were in the black community for a long time, but they didn’t have [drug rehabilitation] programs until it got into the white community .... The hierarchy would give you drugs to control you”. To MOVE, the most concrete representatives of this hierarchy were the police, and MOVE held many demonstrations aimed at focusing attention on issues of police abuse and brutality (Philadelphia, under law-and-order Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, had a national reputation for police misconduct during much of the 1970s). In a seven-month period in 1975, MOVE members were arrested on misdemeanor charges more than 150 times, fined $15,000, and sentenced to several lengthy prison sentences. Seeing the court system as perhaps the most oppressive tool of the “System” conspiracy, MOVE members made it a point to interrupt these sentencing hearings, often turning MOVE trials into veritable sideshows. As the 1970s drew to a close, MOVE’s rhetoric became more fiery and condemnatory, while their political activities became more confrontational— with members often seen brandishing firearms. Such trends were intensified after an 8 August 1978 confrontation with the police, which resulted in one officer dead and nine MOVE members sentenced to 30–100 years for their roles in the melee. Seeing themselves once again as victims of unwarranted oppression, MOVE made it their mission—from their new headquarters on Osage Avenue in west Philadelphia—to continuously call for the release of the “MOVE 9,” whom they saw as political prisoners in their struggle against the tyrannical Philadelphia government. This campaign, often carried out through megaphones and speakers from inside the increasingly fortified MOVE compound, reached its violent conclusion on 13 May 1985, when a showdown between the organization and the Philadelphia city government left eleven members dead (six adults and five children) and sixty-one homes destroyed. MOVE member Ramona Africa was convicted on riot and conspiracy charges in connection with the conflict, and served seven years in prison. MOVE continued to stay in the news throughout the remaining years of the 1980s, and even into the twenty-first century. In the aftermath of the tremendous destruction on Osage Avenue, then-Mayor Wilson W. Goode appointed the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission to examine the events leading up to, and including, the attack on MOVE. In March 1986, the commission issued a report condemning the actions of the city government, concluding that “dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable”. In June 1996, a jury ordered the city of Philadelphia and two former city officials—then-Police Commissioner Gregor Sambor and then-Fire Commissioner William Richard—to pay $1.5 million to a survivor and relatives of two members who died in the May 1985 confrontation. To many MOVE members and supporters, such findings vindicated their belief that the city had actively conspired against them throughout the previous two decades, and was now being made to pay for such actions. During the 1990s, many supporters of convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal—who had written extensively on the 1978 MOVE confrontation and resulting trials—argued that Abu-Jamal had received an unjust sentence based in part on his association with MOVE. Finally, in September 2002 a man involved in a bitter custody dispute with a member of MOVE was found shot to death in a car in New Jersey, the same day he was to pick up the boy for an unsupervised visit. While there was no evidence tying the organization to the murder, MOVE representatives quickly denied any involvement in the crime, and in fact argued that the government was setting up MOVE for the killing. A steadfast belief in a vast conspiracy against them has clearly followed MOVE into the new millennium.

MOVE

A radical African American activist organization, MOVE was influenced by many of the Left’s turn to paranoia and conspiratorial thinking ...

Opinion Polls about Conspiracy Theories

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFCihOhifxggEFDYcn1I04uIkesIsCTvYpQ1rTrgPxQluNh8Rjsx1xfKr6q6bqv1rNyiKQLOLqEh-NcQWjAxDzlaIUXeP6OgiHnsQCbyBFBk72rPYX9lc9ligL99Eem8ho6iRjWiMiAAoj/s1600/conspiracy.jpg" that="" the="" theories="" title="Opinion" today="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Conspiracy Theories</td></tr> </tbody></table> According to polls, most Americans today agree that the scenario posed by at least one popular conspiracy theory is very likely or somewhat likely. On 25–29 June 1997, a survey was conducted of 1,009 people nationwide, with participants from every state and the District of Columbia. Guido H. Stempel III, distinguished professor of the EW Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and Thomas Hargrove of the Scripps Howard News Service conducted the survey. The results have a 4 percent margin of error with a 95 percent confidence interval, meaning that the results are projectable to all U.S. households 95 times out of 100 plus or minus 4 percentage points. At that time: <ul> <li>More than half (51 percent) believe it is very likely or somewhat likely that government officials were “directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.”</li> <li>More than half (60 percent) believe is likely that military officials covered up the dangers of the Agent Orange chemical.</li> <li>Four-fifths (80 percent) believe it is likely that military officials are covering up information about U.S. soldiers’ exposure to nerve gas or germ warfare in the Gulf War.</li> <li>More than one-third (40 percent) believe it is likely that the FBI burned down the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.</li> <li>More than half (52 percent) believe it is likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African Americans in U.S. inner cities.</li> <li>More than one-third believe it is likely the navy shot down <a href=" " target="_blank">TWA Flight 800</a> either intentionally or accidentally.</li> </ul> <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578593689/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=7d6bcbc0215260af131a733c07131956" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1578593689&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=theconthist-20" /></a><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" height="1" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theconthist-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1578593689" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" theories="" today="" width="1" /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786719680/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=b1bf4319d1e6c7fc761b5d2964ed3fd2" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0786719680&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=theconthist-20" /></a><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" height="1" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theconthist-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0786719680" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" theories="" today="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Respondents were asked if the above situations were likely to some degree. The above responses included the “very likely” and “somewhat likely” answers. Note that believing that something is “somewhat likely” may be the admission of possibility, not a firm belief. JFK Assassination <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsn4qEiL785825z2aTGvEQcQUFLX7Xaojl06qvtMptmwl17McTAkCaVtd0mZ3QLWEtCLSeDzwfouDh_B3w3cSlK9SORs0179IAimutRHB-CelC7qUPTfPN3RhakCa2lSJx9EfczRlYO3WT/s1600/jfk.jpg" that="" the="" theories="" title="Opinion" today="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">JFK before assassination</td></tr> </tbody></table> Most Americans say that more than one person was involved in the JFK assassination. A Gallup Poll was conducted 26–28 March 2001 with telephone interviews of a randomly selected sample of 1,024 adults aged 18 and older. The results are projectable to all U.S. households with a 95 percent confidence and 3 percent margin of error. At that time, when asked, “Do you think that one man was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or do you think that others were involved in a conspiracy?”—with the possible answers “one man,” “others involved” and “no opinion”: <blockquote> Fourth-fifths (81 percent) responded that they believed that other people were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, an all-time high.</blockquote> In the 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll, the question concerned not more than one person, but government officials with direct involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The poll discovered: <blockquote> More than half (51 percent) of Americans believe it is very likely or somewhat likely that government officials were “directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.”</blockquote> AIDS and Drugs <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img about="" agree="" alt="most" americans="" at="" border="0" by="" conspiracy="" least="" one="" opinion="" polls="" popular="" posed="" scenario="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6uKwOHMrouow84ASp2aBM2fMw3p6AJMepMWrfG482XSREl4nK4W4Hb3S1MusiGcvy2LiyKaMTnz7rbugUnPbVokObBrxgHmTA5-e-ksoAAZUF-0P5GiY-VwHCWV3r0u85w04Cb3SDEXbz/s1600/aids.jpg" that="" the="" theories="" title="Opinion" today="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aids</td></tr> </tbody></table> A sizable number of people would agree with at least one of the accusations that the government manufactured AIDS or made drugs available in inner cities to attack African Americans. In a 1990 poll, reported in the 29 October 1990 edition of the New York Times: <ul> <li>Nearly one-third (29 percent) of black New Yorkers indicated belief that AIDS was “deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people,” versus one in twenty (5 percent) among white New Yorkers.</li> <li>More than half (60 percent) of black New Yorkers indicated belief that the government “deliberately” made drugs available to poor black people, versus a little more than one in ten (12 percent) among white New Yorkers.</li> </ul> In another 1990 survey, reported in the 2 November 1995 edition of the Boston Globe: <blockquote> More than one-third (34 percent) of black churchgoers polled in five cities agreed “the AIDS virus was produced in a germ warfare laboratory.”</blockquote> The 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll discovered: <blockquote> More than half (52 percent) of Americans believe it likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African Americans in U.S. inner cities.</blockquote> Pearl Harbor About one in three Americans say that <a href=" " target="_blank">President Roosevelt</a> knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance. The Gallup Organization reports that in December 1941, 84 percent of Americans said the president had done “everything he should have to prevent war with Japan,” with only 9 percent disagreeing. Fifty years later, in 1991, Gallup found that nearly one-third of Americans (31 percent) agreed with the statement, “Roosevelt knew about Japanese plans to bomb <a href=" " target="_blank">Pearl Harbor</a> but did nothing about it because he wanted an excuse to involve the United States on the side of the Allies in the war,” with 47 percent disagreeing and 22 percent with no opinion. As an interesting side note, 19 percent said they still have not forgiven the Japanese. Moon Landings The conspiracy theory that the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">moon</a> landings were a fake is less popular. A Gallup Poll was conducted 13–14 July 1999 with telephone interviews of a randomly selected sample of 1,061 adults aged 18 and older. The results are projectable to all U.S. households with a 95 percent confidence and a 3 percent margin of error. When asked, “Thinking about the space exploration, do you think the government staged or faked the Apollo moon landing, or don’t you feel that way?”—with answers being, “Yes, staged,” “No,” and “No opinion”: <blockquote> Less than one in ten (6 percent) believes that the landing was faked while nearly nine in ten (89 percent) do not believe that the lunar landing was faked or staged.</blockquote> Time/CNN/Yakelovich Partners, Inc., conducted a similar poll 19–20 July 1995, with virtually identical wording, and produced similar results: <blockquote> Less than one in ten (6 percent) believes that the landing was faked while more than four-fifths (83 percent) do not believe that the lunar landing was faked or staged.</blockquote> UFOs Many Americans say that the government is hiding information about <a href=" " target="_blank">UFOs</a>. In the 1997 survey conducted by Guido H. Stempel III of the EW Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and Thomas Hargrove of the Scripps Howard News Service mentioned above, nearly half of Americans (47 percent) indicated that it is very likely or somewhat likely that “The U.S. Air Force is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets.” Another study, sponsored by the SCI FI Channel and conducted 23–25 August by RoperASW, found that 72 percent of Americans believe the “government is not telling the public everything it knows about UFO activity,” and 68 percent believe the “government knows more about extraterrestrial life” than it says. The study was conducted among a representative example of 1,021 adults aged 18 and over, with a margin of error of +3 percent. Further, 60 percent of respondents in the RoperASW poll said the government “should not withhold information about UFO sightings,” while 58 percent said the government shouldn’t conceal information about “potential encounters with extraterrestrial life.” Trust in Government The above RoperASW study also discussed the issue of trust in government. The same poll found that about half of Americans (53 percent) say their “level of trust in the government has remained stable over the past five years,” while 29 percent say they trust the government “less than they did five years ago.” More than half of Americans (55 percent) said the government “does not share enough information with the public in general.” After the Oklahoma City bombing, a poll was conducted by the Gallup <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">organization</a> that found that 39 percent of Americans believed that the federal government had become too powerful and large and therefore was a threat to the freedoms and rights of average citizens. In 2000, this number increased to 45 percent, with 51 percent disagreeing that the federal government poses such a threat. The 2000 study was conducted 7–9 April 2000 among a randomly selected national sample of 1,006 adults aged 18 and over, with a margin of error of +3 percent.

Opinion Polls about Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories According to polls, most Americans today agree that the scenario posed by at least one popular conspiracy theory is...

Pan Am 103

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img after="" alt="Scotland" am="" an="" departure="" half="" hour="" just="" pan="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pan Am 103</td></tr> </tbody></table> On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland just half an hour after departure, killing 259 passengers and crew and 9 people on the ground. A bomb was suspected, and authorities recovered the “black box” (the flight voice recorder and data recorder) and examined radar evidence. Britain’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) and Scottish detectives collected 35,000 photographs and interviewed 15,000 people, but it was the discovery of an electronic timer circuit board, which had been placed in a Toshiba cassette player and then loaded into a piece of Samsonite luggage, that provided the necessary clues as to the source of the plane’s destruction. The subsequent investigation, as with the later crash of <a href=" " target="_blank">TWA Flight 800</a>, produced endless analysis, suspicion, claims, and counterclaims. Victims’ families wanted someone to blame; politicians wanted to establish whether the event was an attack; and conspiracy theorists tried to insert the event into existing theories of global politics. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0836865669/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=4689d071f5dbc30f65feff5774afbe88" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0836865669&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img after="" alt="Scotland" am="" an="" departure="" half="" hour="" just="" pan="" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595299474/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=28a9e9ed115a0a3447a39fea4f378b5d" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0595299474&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img after="" alt="Scotland" am="" an="" departure="" half="" hour="" just="" pan="" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Although the explosion occurred while George Bush was president, links were quickly made to President <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ronald Reagan</a>, and then, during the investigation and trial, to President Bill Clinton. Ultimately, a vast array of individuals and organizations were implicated in some way or another to the explosion. The AAIB, led by forensic expert James Thomas Thurman, found the small circuit board in the debris, and could trace the scrap of the circuit board to a Swiss manufacturer. This, in association with specimens from two types of chemicals used to manufacture Semtex, a plastic explosive, convinced authorities there was a bomb aboard the plane that was triggered by a timing device. In 1989, the 350 tons of debris was reassembled at an army base near Carlisle. Investigators then examined the evidence and concluded that it was a bomb, or, in their words, an “intentional explosive device.” The cockpit voice recorder verified a tremendous sound just prior to the aircraft going down, and burn marks on luggage indicated that something exploded in the luggage compartment. Although at first Iran was suspected of what the authorities viewed as a bombing—although the word “bomb” did not appear in the actual report, but rather “improvised explosive device”—the timer shifted the investigation to two Libyan intelligence agents, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Lameen “The Egg” Fhima, who were indicted in 1991 and named by both British and U.S. governments as the culprits. There were, however, numerous other theories and suspects: <ul> <li>Ahmed Jibril, head of the General Command of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC). Supported by Syria, the PFLP hated Israel and wanted to punish the United States for its support of the Jewish State. Conspiracy theorists claim that Jibril, however, could not be brought to justice because Palestine is not a sovereign state or a member of the United Nations. This conspiracy theory is also tied to Iran, which supposedly bankrolled the operation, but Syria could not be implicated because, by the time the United States learned all the details, it was involved in the Gulf War and President George Bush needed Syria as part of the coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein.</li> <li>Iran. One of the most widely held conspiracy theories is that Iranian agents blew Pan Am 103 out of the skies in retaliation for an incident that occurred in July 1988 when the USS Vincennes, mistaking an Iranian passenger aircraft for a hostile plane over the Straits of Hormuz, shot down the Iranian plane filled with civilians, killing 290. Iranian leaders vowed to “avenge the blood of our martyrs.”</li> <li>Drug runners and/or the CIA. In this version of events, “rogue” CIA agents in the Reagan administration, working through Oliver North, were attempting to free U.S. hostages in the Middle East. The middlemen in the operation were heroin runners from Syria who transported drugs to the United States through Frankfurt, Germany. According to one “informant,” a smuggler (with the CIA’s knowledge) would check luggage onto a plane and an accomplice in the baggage department would substitute an identical bag containing narcotics. (There is no explanation for the need for two people here, or why anyone with access to the baggage department would not be able to just plant the bogus bag himself.) At any rate, Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian drug smuggler, who was behind the operation, learned that a hostage rescue team had discovered the smuggling operation, and that the team was aboard Pan Am 103. PBS’s television aktivitas Frontline claimed in January 1990 that these “intelligence officials” were a “strong secondary target.” At that point, the various theories reach a confluence of sorts, with Jibril handling the actual details of the bombing, switching a suitcase bomb for the drug luggage.</li> <li>Yet another version involved Oliver North and the CIA, especially as it related to another aircraft explosion, over Gander, Newfoundland, in December 1985. In this iteration, a group of special operations forces smuggled a small nuclear “backpack” bomb aboard the aircraft in Cairo, which they originally were to have transported to Iraq to blow up the Iraqi nuclear weapons development facility under the guise of a nuclear accident. Supposedly, when these soldiers understood that their mission was a suicide mission, they backed out, but to keep them quiet, the government ordered their Arrow Air DC-8 destroyed by a bomb, which caused the aircraft to crash at Gander, killing 248. The connection to Pan Am 103 is that supposedly the same timing device was found at each site, and in a letter to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in 1998, the president of the firm that made the timers claimed that the circuit board in both explosions was made for the CIA.</li> <li>There was no bomb at all. As in the case of TWA 800, which exploded in 1996, one theory maintains that there was no bomb at all. This theory suggests that there was an explosion, which has been attributed to, among other things, a shotgun or a flare gun going off, a structural defect in the airplane causing the cabin door to rip free, or an electrical fault. Like other theories, this theory hinges on the absence of bomb fragments at the crash site, and, as with TWA 800, this version mostly arose from passengers in litigation who wanted to prove negligence by the aircraft manufacturers. In particular, rapid decom- pression theories emphasized the location in both Pan Am 103 and TWA 800 of the nose section as having fallen off before the aircraft finally crashed, indicating an explosion separated the front section of the aircraft from the aft. Carl A. Davies, author of Plane Truth, and John Berry Smith, a British investigator, comparing tests of Pan Am 103, TWA 800, and Air India 182, found no evidence of bombtype explosions that totally demolished the section in which a bomb was located in controlled bomb tests. Other “explanations” have included an “electromagnetic high-energy slug” either deliberately or accidentally fired from Alaska.</li> <li>The Mossad. A view popular with antisemites, this version maintains that the Mossad planted a bomb to kill Americans so as to “discredit” Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yassir Arafat’s “peace initiative.” This version lacks the details of most of the other explanations, but still manages to place blame on President George Bush.</li> <li>The Palestinians. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered aktivitas produced a “confession” in 1994 by Youssef Shaaban, a Palestinian who was standing trial for the killing of a Jordanian diplomat. Many observers, however, considered his confession a desperate attempt to gain a stay on a sure death sentence.</li> <li>In addition to possible guilty individuals or groups, charges were also leveled at Pan Am and/or airport security for weak security measures in England.</li> </ul> Due to the fact that the incident occurred over Scottish airspace, the trial took place under Scottish law, but because of the international nature of the bombing, with multiple possible locations and passengers of all nationalities, the trial was held at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands by way of treaty agreement between Libya, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In May 2000, the court under Scottish High Court judge Lord Ranald Sutherland convened. The following January, the court delivered a mixed verdict of guilty for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and an acquittal for Lameen Fhima. Al-Megrahi immediately appealed. Meanwhile, the families of the Pan Am 103 flight had begun a long quest to sue Libya for damages, overturning a traditional principle of international law. Allan Gerson, a former diplomat, took the case for the families and, partly as a result of changes in antiterrorism legislation following the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1996 the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act was amended to permit lawsuits like Gerson’s to proceed. In 1998, a federal appeals court ruled that lawsuits against Libya could proceed. Among the victims was twenty-year-old Theodora Cohen, whose parents waged a campaign to sue Libya, calling the attack a “ghastly act of war.” Susan and Daniel Cohen, Theodora’s parents, who wrote Pan Am 103, claimed that Clinton administration efforts at “normalizing” relations with Khaddafi’s Libya had interfered with prosecution of the case against the terrorist state.

Pan Am 103

Pan Am 103 On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland just half an hou...

Paranoia

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" rel="nofollow" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="blank"><img alt="The" ancient="" border="0" commonly="" concept="" is="" of="" paranoia="" psychiatric="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDDIAU-atM47W2T3Gyau2uVz6L1MJC2x5GnX8ovlwRlZ2QblzechEaGzVnYAv6YKsh8OmKqXtfOhdoZvHBq8PLNSLjiJK0QEirHgMKv3w5Y4OseYLv1-VpzZ0nm6a14MKhARkeNss6RYeG/s1600/paranoia.jpg" title="Paranoia" to="" traced="" width="470" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paranoia</td></tr> </tbody></table> The psychiatric concept of paranoia is commonly traced to ancient <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Greece</a>, where Hippocrates inaugurated it among several other mental maladies, coining the term from the Greek para (meaning “beside,” or “changed”) and nous (signifying “mind,” or “reason”). Its etymology can also be traced back to Plato’s and Aretaeus’s identifications of “religious madness” and “divine mania,” or citations in the work of Francois Boissier de Sauvages (Pathologie Methodica, 1759) to transformative delusions in which patients believed they were being transformed into either animals or the opposite sex. It was not until Etienne Esquirol’s Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (1845) and, later, Emil Kraepelin’s Textbook of Psychiatry (1883–1915) that the concept of paranoia, as it is understood today, began to take shape. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062135562/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=d4956c167930644875ea582f559c4a86" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0062135562&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" ancient="" border="0" commonly="" concept="" height="1" is="" of="" paranoia="" psychiatric="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0062135562" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" to="" traced="" width="1" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801486068/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=a83893950f6ed8713cb86e70b79af76d" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0801486068&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" ancient="" border="0" commonly="" concept="" height="1" is="" of="" paranoia="" psychiatric="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=0801486068" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" to="" traced="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Esquirol’s descriptivist account catalogued, among others, erotic, reasoning, theomaniacal, incendiary, and homicidal monomanias. Paranoia was identified as a délire partiel (monomania), a folie raisonante (a reasoning madness). Kraepelin’s influential definition of dementia praecox (early-onset dementia, now classed under the broad category of schizophrenia) most deeply informs the contemporary understanding of the concept as a delusional disorder that builds a highly organized, grandiose system that is held with great conviction. From this tradition and that which followed, paranoia has come to be characterized by symptoms such as projective thinking, hostility, suspicion, centrality, delusions, fear of the loss of autonomy, and grandiosity. Even though paranoids are often able to achieve a high level of occupational functioning, unlike other psychoses, there is no pharmaceutical or therapeutic “cure” for paranoia. The most famous case of paranoia, which has served as the basis for most of the major contributions on the study of the subject as well as being a remarkable autobiography of paranoia, is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [1903]). Schreber, a high-ranking German judge, describes the slow and torturous process of being transformed into a woman by God in order to bring forth a new race of men; being made into God’s sexual slave; and being the victim of a “soul murder” at the hands of Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig, the director of the psychiatric hospital in which he first stayed. Sigmund Freud’s influential study of the case read paranoia as a defense against (unconscious) homosexuality, or homosexual attack. Although this theory has largely been cast aside, it is notable for Freud’s first theorization of projection. Freud also argued that paranoia is a recuperative process, one in which the paranoid attempts to rebuild his or her world after a psychotic break through delusion. Interestingly, “paranoia” as a discrete medicalpsychiatric definition no longer exists. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) instead classifies it as an aspect of other psychoses, such as schizophrenia. The category of paranoia gradually moved beyond the psychiatric domain and began to be used by philosophers and social theorists to explain literary texts, social formations, and historical epochs. The discourse of heroic “enlightenment”—which seeks to uncover, reveal, and disclose knowledges that are otherwise concealed, shrouded, and hidden—is firmly entrenched in Western philosophical traditions. The notion of “suspicion” as an interpretive <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">strategy</a> can be traced from academic and Pyrrhonian skepticism through to the work of Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Hobbes. Paul Ricouer identifies Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as the key proponents of a tradition that sought to redirect its Cartesian doubt from a regard of things, to doubt consciousness itself. In Crowds and Power (1962), Elias Canetti describes paranoia as an “illness of power” that can help to explain the nature of political power in general. Canetti establishes an equivalence between paranoids like Schreber and despots and rulers such as Adolph Hitler and Genghis Khan. Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” continues this genealogy by theorizing paranoia as a political style, rather than a pathological category. Conducted under the banner of “Studies on the American Right,” it charted the paranoid style in U.S. political life since independence, through the central characteristic of persecution and its systematization in conspiracy theory. Hofstadter sought to describe a generally right-wing style of mind, and chose to refer to it as “paranoid” because “no other word evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that characterizes this mindset. The concept of paranoia has dispersed into popular culture in a vast array of forms including films such as JFK (dir. Oliver Stone 1991) and Conspiracy Theory (dir. Richard Donner 1997), television programs such as The X-Files and Nowhere Man, pamphlets, rants, and tracts of every political color, magazines such as Paranoia, and books such as Jim Keith’s Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (1993). Rhetorics of paranoia can be identified in popular music, from Black Sabbath’s classic anthem “Paranoid” to Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, and Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid.” The paranoid ethic of hypervigilance even extends to managerial advice books such as Andrew S. Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career (1999). The cultural sensibility expressed in these works, one that has wholly digested Delmore Schwartz’s adage that “even paranoids have real enemies,” suggests that there is less danger in being paranoid than in not being paranoid enough. Like the term “conspiracy theorist,” “paranoid” represents a heavily loaded political and epistemological description, one that is used at certain times as an ironic form of self-identification, and at others, as a condemnatory indictment. In a fashion similar to the way “conspiracy theory” is used as a description of false history, the accusation of paranoia has become a powerful tactic in the marginalization of one’s ideological opponents. Cultural critics and pop psychologists have in recent years taken up the psychiatric history of paranoia, and (consciously or not) Freud’s contribution to it, in their attempts to delegitimize those they consider conspiracy theorists. The conspiracy theorist (or paranoid), it is argued, takes an object or figure that was once revered and transforms it into the focus of persecutory anxiety, so that their conspiracy theories tell us more about the subject’s own desire and fear than they do about anything in the world. Paranoia, so the story goes, is a disease of disaffection: the WASP patriot, the militant feminist, and the Islamic fundamentalist are united by their marginality, one which organizes their thinking in a paranoid or conspiratorial fashion. Other critics have argued that such theories form appropriate responses to actual circumstances: for example, the widespread belief in the African American community of the early 1990s that the government was spreading drugs such as crack cocaine in poor black communities should not be read simply as “paranoid,” but as a dramatization of very real fears of an institutionally sponsored kegiatan of genocidal neglect, one that is based on the historical revelation of actual conspiracies such as COINTELPRO and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

Paranoia

Paranoia The psychiatric concept of paranoia is commonly traced to ancient Greece , where Hippocrates inaugurated it among several othe...

William L Pierce

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img a="" alt="An" and="" arch="" as="" border="0" conspiracy="" l="" leader="" pierce="" publisher="" racial="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilItdk-0o4_5OPAH6CfbA3eM_yxJosGoGRF6etGVDh25HTzUb5oT7aVI8R64q6X8rYFFCy7YrKdHELgOIbn4NoIWFY70b3gYjXxvQ8zHGaJJyhJgGul5yiivtNpxwgptoPQOzl7TpOMqZQ/s1600/William-Pierce.jpg" supremacist="" theorist="" title="William" well="" white="" width="470" william="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William L Pierce</td></tr> </tbody></table> An arch racial conspiracy theorist as well as a white supremacist leader and publisher, William Pierce is most widely known for his novel The Turner Diaries. The novel, like most of Pierce’s writings, depicts a racial revolution to overcome a national, multicultural conspiracy against Anglo-Saxon Americans in the late twentieth century. The Turner Diaries generally had an underground existence as a magazine serial among many white supremacist movements until its publication as a book in 1978, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation denounced it as the most dangerous book in the United States. Pierce’s pseudonymous novel became notorious, however, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the <a href=" " target="_blank">Oklahoma City</a> Murrah Federal Building in April 1995, killing 168 people in an enactment of one of the novel’s key scenes. An excerpt from The Turner Diaries was found with McVeigh at the time of his arrest and has since propelled Pierce’s name as well as his organization, National Alliance, into the mainstream media. <table align="center" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1569800863/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=1e4f3bafcdca1c3b526a459adf2b612f" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1569800863&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="An" and="" arch="" as="" border="0" conspiracy="" height="1" l="" leader="" pierce="" publisher="" racial="" src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1569800863" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" supremacist="" theorist="" well="" white="" width="1" william="" /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1291388575/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&linkCode=li3&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=df8a9ecb7696863b9daea6b801af0b19" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1291388575&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="An" and="" arch="" as="" border="0" conspiracy="" height="1" l="" leader="" pierce="" publisher="" racial="" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1291388575" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" supremacist="" theorist="" well="" white="" width="1" william="" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> Pierce justifies his extremist writings with a conspiracy theorist’s fear of ethnic diversity; in his writing, the liberal conspiracy to pollute the United States with multiculturalism represents the end of the white race. Ironically, Pierce’s work depicts and even exhorts a conspiracy of its own: the targeting and killing of those who represent or support racial diversity in the United States. While his fiction depicts the political strife of war in an imagined social transition from a multicultural to a white United States, Pierce also expresses his extremist politics through other political modes such as Libertarian and militia ideologies. Pierce’s incendiary rhetoric has been effective with some of his readers; The Turner Diaries is known to have inspired other crimes. In the early 1980s, a group named for The Turner Diaries’ highest echelon of resistance fighters (the Order) committed murder, robbery, and counterfeiting, and bombed a synagogue in Colorado. In the early 1990s, a group calling itself the Aryan Republican Army committed bank robberies and bombings across the Midwest. Later in the 1990s, members of the New Order in St. Louis were arrested for plotting to bomb the Anti-Defamation League’s New York headquarters, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Although Pierce denies the influence of The Turner Diaries or any other of his many publications and broadcasts in inspiring violent acts, he has a history of generating conspiracy rhetoric that exhorts those who would seek a white United States to take action. Pierce has been active in right-wing extremist movements since the 1960s. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, 11 September 1933, he holds a B.Sc. from Rice University (1955), and an M.A. (1958) and a Ph.D. (1962) in physics from the University of Colorado. Pierce was an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965. He then became a senior research scientist at the Advanced Materials Research Development Laboratory of United Aircraft’s Pratt and Whitney Division in 1965–1966. During this time he was involved with the John Birch Society. By 1966, Pierce left his employment and the John Birch Society for full-time neo-Nazi activism with the American Nazi Party, run by George Lincoln Rockwell. There, he edited the National Socialist World, a quarterly journal for academics and intellectuals. When Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce became one of the leaders of the National Socialist White People’s Party, which succeeded the American Nazi Party. By 1970, Pierce left the National Socialist White People’s Party to join the National Youth Alliance, a far-right political group whose aim was to disrupt liberal causes on college campuses. Infighting between Pierce and the Nazi Youth Party’s founder, Willis Carto, split the group into factions. Pierce’s wing came to be known as the National Alliance, a group he has run since 1974. Pierce relocated the National Alliance from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346-acre farm in Mill Point, West Virginia. In many ways, Pierce is the National Alliance; he runs all aspects of the organization and writes most of and entirely oversees all its media. Pierce edits and writes for its magazine, National Vanguard (originally Attack!), and an internal newsletter, National Alliance Bulletin (formerly titled Action), as well as Resistancemagazine. He also oversees several businesses as part of the National Alliance: National Vanguard Books, Resistance Records, and Cymaphane Records. Additionally, Pierce broadcasts a weekly radio program, American Dissident Voices on AM/FM and shortwave radio and writes articles for Free Speech, the program’s newsletter. The National Alliance aims to become the world’s largest umbrella organization for white supremacy and is well on its way to meeting that goal. Domestically, Pierce created affiliations with the antigovernment Patriot movement during its rise in the 1990s. A decade later, he reached out to neo-Nazi youth groups, once again, through his record labels. With chapters in twenty-three states and a web page that is translatable into eight languages, the National Alliance has become well established. The use of technology has driven Pierce’s outreach efforts and allows for unique associations: in 2002, a large excerpt from one of his radio speeches, downloaded to a National Alliance listserv, ended up on a Hezbollah website two weeks later. The National Alliance provides a range of literature, radio, and music targeting both general and specific audiences that disseminate white supremacist conspiracy theories. Specifically, Pierce’s work describes a national crisis for white racial purism—a conspiracy of multiculturalism—and urges political activism and the recruitment of new members to build a political movement. However, National Alliance’s ideology frequently describes force as the means to this reclamation of a white ancestry and a commitment to building a white nation. Pierce’s fiction, written under the name Andrew Macdonald, depicts con- spiracy theorists reacting to a perceived conspiracy of racial treason. Largely critical of Jewish media and business in the United States, these novels also focus on miscegenation and other racial “pollution” of the Anglo-Saxon bloodline. In these imagined scenarios, race patriots intend to provoke a racial war that will allow for armed rebellion and the creation of a white nation. In The Turner Diaries, the United States is represented as severely intolerant of a specific “racism”—defined as acts perpetrated by whites against people of color—and has created a climate in which white people are under scrutiny for racist transgressions while people of color exploit the situation. The seemingly liberal government extends its oppressive influence with a law that repeals the Second Amendment right to own firearms. The consequent insurrection—which eventually becomes a global race war—is chronicled by one of its unassuming heroes, Earl Turner, whose fellow patriotic, militant white supremacists have prepared to fight “the System’s” despotism. Turner’s diary describes his experiences as he organizes small resistance cells and goes about the daily labor of domestic terrorism in the conspiracy to overthrow the government. Some of the novel’s major scenes include a mortar attack on Washington, D.C., and a truck bombing of FBI headquarters (which McVeigh borrowed for his terrorism in Oklahoma City). One of the most graphic scenes is “the Day of the Rope,” in which the group publicly hangs tens of thousands of race traitors with placards describing their treason. Turner’s heroic acts lead to his induction into the group’s inner circle (the Order)—a transcendence that concludes with Turner’s suicide mission and subsequent martyrdom as the group’s savior. By the novel’s end, the New Era of white dominance has overcome the racial conspiracy. Pierce’s second novel, Hunter, published in 1989, reaches out to a different readership, moving away from the working-class emphasis of The Turner Diaries and focusing on a highly educated audience. The conspiracy of multiculturalism is the same, but the focus is the Jewish-owned media’s social role. Protagonist Oscar Yeager is a talented engineer who, although highly educated and extremely rational, is being uncharacteristically reactionary—literally hunting black and white “miscegenating” couples in his disgust about the decline of the race. Unlike Turner, however, Yeager seeks a deeper, intellectual contextualization of his white supremacism as well as a solution that speaks to the social ambiguities he perceives. Hunter chronicles Yeager’s hunt for a philosophy, his subsequent education about the Jewish media conspiracy, and his own answer to the racial conspiracy of a multicultural United States. In the novel’s solution, Yeager becomes a media mogul who educates the U.S. public about white supremacism with a fundamentalist television preacher and deposes the Jewish media monopoly by gaining the largest market share of the viewing audience. The novel depicts Yeager’s media counterconspiracy as a success both in reaching white America and beginning the transition to a racially pure nation with less large-scale bloodshed but, rather, key behind-the-scene assassinations at high levels. In addition to his two novels, Pierce published Serpent’s Walk, another racial conspiracy text, in 1991, under the name Randolph D. Calverhall, and has two other books published with National Vanguard Books: The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid (1984) and Gun Control in Germany, 1928–1945 (1994). Pierce’s organization has reached out to other spheres of influence: from the purchase of AT&T stock in order to use the share-holder meetings as a platform for antisemitic speech, to the targeting of youth markets in his newest ventures. The most diverse products in his catalog include the 1993 comic title, New World Order Comix #1, The Saga of ... White Will! and a computer game depicting a virtual race war: “Ethnic Cleansing: The Game!” In 1999, Pierce became involved in the music industry through white power music labels Resistance and Cymophane Records. Pierce finds conspiracy everywhere he looks: organizations working against hate-speech have targeted Pierce’s various businesses and have worked to discredit his tax-exempt status (through his Church of the Creator organization) as well as to direct attention toward his enterprise. In 1996, the Southern Poverty Law Center won an $85,000 judgment against Pierce for his role in an effort to keep Church of the Creator assets from the family of a murdered member, Harold Mansfield. Pierce continues to refer to these groups as part of the conspiracy against white values and white supremacism, just as he continues to find ways to bring his extremist politics to mainstream media.

William L Pierce

William L Pierce An arch racial conspiracy theorist as well as a white supremacist leader and publisher, William Pierce is most widely ...

Chief Pontiac

Chief Pontiac

Chief Pontiac A war leader of the Odawa tribe, Pontiac (often called Chief Pontiac) was identified by many contemporary British colonia...

American History